I have posted this in the general discussion about sync changes but Grégoire Michel suggested I start a new discussion here for maximum visibility as it could potentially affect all PE customers using Marketo.

Historically, SFDC allowed Professional Edition customers to integrate with Marketo without a specific API subscription in SFDC, as they have done with a number of AppExchange products, but now appearing to be withdrawing this from Marketo. This is causing real issues with my Professional Edition customers.

I have just had a worrying conversation with our SFDC account manager. We had a note just before Christmas from our Marketo account manager telling us that we would need to purchase API access in order to continue to sync to SFDC after the end of January. However, when speaking to the SFDC account manager, he tells me that API access for Professional Edition only allows one-way access, i.e. into SFDC, so would not allow us to sync bi-directionally.

SFDC tells me they are doing this because Marketo is a competitive product to Pardot.

SFDC are telling me that it is not possible to purchase 2-way API access for the Professional Edition. The rep stressed that only 1-way access is provided to PE customers. This is really major - it will affect ALL Marketo customers using the Professional Edition. SFDC are more or less forcing us to upgrade to Enterprise, which will cost a bomb for a small R&D company.

Are other PE customers hearing this from SFDC? Is our rep telling the truth about API access for PE only being one way?

I would appreciate other PE customers weighing in here after speaking to their SFDC account managers!

Copying here some of the comments I made on the other thread, and adding a couple:

List price for EE is 2 times list price for PE.

Yet, Salesforce cannot just cut this as they want. People have contracts, some of them multi-year contracts, and the products delivered cannot be changed at least until the contract is ended. So if someone can be hit by this in January, it's only those whose contract will be renewed now, or customers who just want to acquire the API now.

I am investigating on my side of the ocean and I'll keep you posted, but here in France, no one has ever got the API on PE for free. It's being charged an additional 30% on top of the PE licence.

Also, and that's my personal experience, when SFDC stops something, it only impacts new customers, not existing one. I, for instance benefit from the old FREE self service portal that has been discontinued 3 years ago, but since we have been renewing our contract for 7 years now, we still get it.

The fact that Marketo is a competitive product to Pardot is really not a good argument: the API can be used for any third party product. It's documentation is completely public and SFDC cannot control what one is using the API for. Furthermore, legally, in the EU, you cannot refuse to sell the API to 1 customer and agree to sell it to another. So if SFDC wants to stop the product, they will have to do it for everyone. This means that simply interrupting the API for all PE customers would not just drive mad Marketo customers, but thousands of SFDC customers using the API for any other purpose, excepted Marketing automation. Not a very good move if you want my take. This would end up upgrading everyone to the EE for the price of the PE and opening a very large door to salesforce alternatives

So all this seems quite weird, even may be is it a personal initiative of a not so ethical sales person.

However, if we aren't actually paying for the API, then we haven't got API access. My understanding was they exposed the API to Marketo for PE customers and are now pulling this access. So it wasn't the customer that got API access, it was Marketo for their integration.

I know that there are other AppExchange integrations available with the Professional Edition that you don't (as the customer) have to have API access, that use this same mechanism. My understanding from the SFDC rep was that they were pulling this from Marketo, not from other partners. I may be wrong, but this is what the rep said when I asked if this was the same for all AppExchange products that integrated with the PE.

One of the reasons that I posted this was in the hope that other customers have had a more helpful response from SFDC and I could use this as leverage. I want to hear that what the rep said is not true - especially as 1-way API access sounds very suspect to me.

It might simply be a misunderstanding from the sales rep. The API on PE is not as complete as the one on EE. It is simply the external soap API that enables a third party app to connect to SFDC, and you do not get the APEX code that includes the capability for SFDC to connect to a third party app. In that sense, the SOAP API could be qualified as a one way API or lite API.

But this SOAP API does enable data to flow both ways and is just what Marketo connector needs, and PE customers are just OK with it.

I've been getting more details and I was mistaken in the other thread. The Marketo > SFDC integration only needs one-way API calls. All of the data transferred through the standard integration goes through the API calls that are generated from Marketo. No API calls are generated by SFDC, so you do only need the one-way API calls.

Thank you all for the clarification. I can confirm that the "you must upgrade to the Enterprise Edition" response received from Erica's Salesforce rep is exactly what I received. As of Jan 31st, midnight, our Marketo sync with Salesforce went down and has remained inoperable.

We had followed the instructions from Marketo and contacted Salesforce support last year about the potential for sync problems. We added the new fields and were told that there should be no sync issues.

When the sync stopped we naturally got on the horn with both Salesforce and Marketo and, after much back and forth, were told that a SF upgrade would be necessary to resume the integration. We're a small company with 13 SF users. My SF contract is up in July and I have no intention of paying what amounts to blackmail to upgrade.

Anyone gotten else having the same issues? Anyone found a work-around?

Sorry to hear that you're having the problems here. I can't speak for Salesforce's sales team and what their sales reps want to say. However, that said, you don't need to upgrade to a newer version of Salesforce just to get SOAP API access. It should be available as an add-on that can be added to your existing Professional Edition version. Obviously they're going to charge for that add-on because it's a new addition to your service, but it should not require a full upgrade to Enterprise Edition. As long as the add-on you get is SOAP API access, there shouldn't be any need to upgrade unless Salesforce has changed their policies.

What Mike Reynolds says above is true. We added API access to our Professional Edition subscription and the sync has continued to work. The reps are over-enthusiastic (charitable interpretation) in their sales tactics.

Hope this helps,

- Erica (from a different account, as I work for a few Marketo clients)

We had to purchased API licences for all users, they won't do it any other way. I don't know the cost increase (I'm not on the commercial side) but it was definitely a lot cheaper than upgrading to Enterprise for 31 users! The Salesforce salespeople appear to have huge target pressure because their sales tactics have been pretty borderline with us (not just with this issue, which was particularly bad).

The SF rep has been all over the place on what this is going to cost. One API license per user was one of the cost estimates. That is a significant cost increase for something that was free during the original purchase.